To explain the recent price fall he described gold's rise to $1,762 as being "as perfect as one could wish for" in terms of Elliott Waves and that the fall was a classic second wave down. He said that the whole downward wave may have occurred in one day but he reckoned that further decline to $1,685 was more likely.

"It is possible that the entire correction in minor wave (ii) occurred in one day. A rally followed by a further decline to test the $1685 area is a more likely outcome. An 8% decline would bring the $1650 area into play. If gold drops below this level we will have to consider other possibilities."

Also before the weekend Ian Cowie of the Telegraph had a gold could fall to $1,000 prediction from an independent financial adviser called Brian Dennehy: "Our technical analysis suggests one of two possibilities. That the bull run is over and the price will eventually work its way down into the $700 to $1,000 range – or one final high lies just ahead before that large correction towards $1,000 will begin.”

On Friday on BullionVault I read:"Another move below $1690 will have the market refocusing back toward $1500," says the latest note from gold bullion dealing bank Scotia Mocatta's technical analysis team, referring to the low hit after Wednesday's $100 per ounce drop. The gold price has not fallen so hard "since the days of Lehman's collapse".

On Sunday on the FT website John Dizard set store in an expert who believed the sell-off of 31 tonnes of gold on 29 Feb was couple of "clumsy" hedge fund managers offloading oversized gold holdings - and nothing for goldbugs to worry about.

You can see some kind of confirmation from Hargreaves Lansdown's top ten selling shares by value to UK investors which has two physical gold ETFs in the line-up.

My task in the morning is to decide on a price at which I'd be prepared to buy ETF Securities Physical Gold (PHAU) - not in the top 20 list above but been told it is the better deal in terms of spreads - otherwise exactly the same as the sterling version (PHGP).

If I aim to buy 10 shares at a time and I've got about £5,065 of cash left in my HL account it means I've got at least four more buying opportunities at or below this price.

Psychologically it's always a no win situation. If I find myself paying less the next time I'll be nervous that the gold price is collapsing, if I find myself paying more, I'll be annoyed that I hadn't invested more sooner.

Spreads

A couple of quotes showing the buying and selling prices (spreads) from Friday showed the two ETFs PHAU ($) and PHGP (£) were close but I'm not sure how often that is the case or under what circumstances the difference between the two widen. ETF Securities - which is up for sale - never got back to me with those figures.

Here the price at which I could buy PHGP was 10,574p while the selling price was 10,587p - a spread of 0.123%.

At roughly the same time I could buy the dollar denominated PHAU for $167.49 but I if I wanted to sell it I'd be paid $167.67 per share - a spread of .107%. The difference has been a lot wider before with PHAU the better option.